The culture minister, Margaret Hodge, is pressing for the faster introduction of powers to allow six major libraries to copy every free website based in the UK as part of their efforts to record Britain's cultural, scientific and political history...

Between 1935 and 1953, the Carnegie Institution of Washington excavated Kaminaljuyú and established it as one the most significant archaeological Pre-Columbian sites in Mesoamerica. Kaminaljuyú (meaning, in the Quiché language, "Hills of the Dead") grew from an agricultural community (ca. 2500 BCE) in the central highlands of Guatemala to become a large ceremonial site and political Maya capital that flourished until about 800 CE.

Harvard’s Committee on Exploration in the Orient designated the American archaeologist George A. Reisner to direct the University’s expedition to Samaria. With sponsorship from Jacob H. Schiff, the expedition was intended to excavate the site of Samaria (Sebaste), which was the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Israel.

Reisner located remains of the royal palace built by Omri and Ahab during the Israelite period, as well as remnants of buildings constructed during later periods of occupation by Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans. Noteworthy among the artifacts found were ostraca, or pottery fragments, depicting Hebrew-character inscriptions in carbon ink of Biblical names and memoranda of commercial shipments.

Through the Islamic Heritage Project (IHP), Harvard University has cataloged, conserved, and digitized hundreds of Islamic manuscripts, maps, and published texts from Harvard’s renowned library and museum collections. These rare—and frequently unique—materials are now freely available to Internet users worldwide. IHP is made possible with the generous support of Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal.

For the IHP, Harvard’s Open Collections Program (OCP) has produced digital copies of over 260 manuscripts, 270 printed texts, and 50 maps, totaling over 145,000 pages—with more items to be added in coming months. Users can search or browse online materials that date from the 13th to the 20th centuries CE and represent many

The Center for Celtic Studies at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee publishes the electronic journal e-Keltoi: Journal of Interdisciplinary Celtic Studies. The journal is an integral part of the Center's mission to promote and disseminate research and communication related to Celtic cultures, past and present, in the academic arena as well as for the general public. Web resources on Celtic Culture that are content-rich, reliable and current are rare, and are very much in demand. The journal provides free access to cutting-edge, peer-reviewed articles solicited to address specific themes from a range of cross-disciplinary and international perspectives. The goal is to make full use of the electronic medium in a way that cannot be equalled by print journals due to cost or formatting constraints: numerous full-color images per article; video and audio clips; links to other sites embedded in the text; etc. The Celtic world is an especially rich source of graphic images, material culture, and oral as well as performative traditions, all of which can be presented especially effectively in an electronic format.

Members of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, supported in part by a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation (project: Creating a Sustainable Digital Cuneiform Library), have collaborated with leading experts in Old Assyrian studies to coordinate the digital capture and web dissemination of Old Assyrian documents held in numerous public and private collections worldwide. These clay tablets, excavated in modern Turkey, record the 20th century BC dealings, personal and professional, of a set of traders from the distant capital city Assur, and have for many decades been at the center of an extended discussion of long-distance trade in the ancient world. In total, more than 4650 transliterations of Old Assyrian records were made available to CDLI by specialists in Old Assyrian research. The conversion of these legacy files to CDLI's ASCII Transliteration Format (ATF) required a substantial effort by project collaborators Jacob Dahl (Oxford), Bob Englund, Marjan Yahyanejad (both UCLA), and Steve Tinney (UPenn). We are acutely aware of the fact that, despite our work, these transliterations still contain a substantial number of errors, both those remaining from original files and those introduced through our automatic and manual text conversion. In particular, irregularly coded text preservation markers resulted, in conversion, in the designation as broken (with brackets [...]) of transliteration that is in fact preserved on the text. Further, the important word separators (small vertical wedges, designated in our files with the forward slash "/") had to be reconstituted after a conversion error, and some number may have been missed in correction. These errors will in time be removed by further collation with the original files, or by exploiting the increased online access to hand copies and to images of original tablets (below). But the now fairly consistent transliterations represent a substantial new set of research tools for specialists as well as for web users with general linguistic interests, and it would make no sense to us to withhold them from general web access due to the caveats we feel we should make to users.

In conjunction with the conversion and processing of transliterations and catalogue entries, CDLI staff and collaborators in Los Angeles, Berlin and Oxford have begun with the processing and posting of image data documenting the corpus. The inclusion in CDLI pages of available published hand copies of texts, and of images of original tablets, facilitates the ongoing transliteration and collation work of collaborators in this project. Line art copies are being processed by UCLA staff, while Jacob Dahl (Oxford) and Mellon postdoctoral associate Christina Tsouparopoulou (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin) have imaged some numbers of original tablets. The full Old Assyrian digital files of CDLI (currently ca. 5550 entries) are viewable at http://tinyurl.com/yzqewkt, and we have put up a complete text file of available and converted Old Assyrian transliterations, together with sign and word lists, at http://cdli.ucla.edu/downloads.html; we note that Steve Tinney is preparing an updated RTF convertor for ATF files that will produce nicely formatted text processor (RTF) facsimiles of transliterations for use in publications.

Any assistance that AWOL readers can give us in scanning, or merely in gaining access to further Old Assyrian exemplars so that CDLI can perform their digital capture, would be greatly appreciated.

Robert K. Englund, University of California, Los AngelesJacob L. Dahl, Oxford University

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Multidisciplinary and Discipline-Specific Collections at JSTORThe following journals have been added to the JSTOR archive. More detailed information about JSTOR titles and collections, along with delimited lists, can be accessed from JSTOR's Available Collections page

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

As part of our committment to broaden access to anthropological research, AAA is now providing free access to content from American Anthropologist, Anthropology News, Ethos,and PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review that published before 1974...

Sunday, December 13, 2009

The Cooperative Digital Resources Initiative of the American Theological Library Association and Association of Theological Schools is a repository of digital resources contributed by member libraries. The creation of CDRI was made possible by a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation; it is now an ongoing ATLA program. The CDRI database provides access to digital images of woodcuts, photographs, slides, papyri, coins, maps, postcards, manuscripts, lithographs, sermons, shape-note tune books, and various forms of Christian art, architecture, and iconography.

Fornvännen is the leading journal for antiquarian research in Sweden. It is also the oldest and most widely distributed journal, with the largest review section in the subject field in Scandinavia. Publication started in 1906. The leading Scandinavian experts in archaeology and Medieval research are published in Fornvännen. The articles in Fornvännen are written mainly in Swedish, sometimes in Danish, Norwegian, English and German. From 1925 there are abstracts and picture headings in English or German. In later issues non-English articles are provided with a Summary in English.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

...Classical studies assure the role of collecting, preserving and investigating the distinguished spiritual activities of human beings, as preserved by the various traditions. The project “Towards a Reconstitution of Classical Studies” proposes that the scholars of the various fields of Classical studies engaged in such important activities should cooperate for the first time in history in order to reconstitute the realm of Classical studies...

ASLIP was founded in 1986 to encourage international, interdisciplinary information sharing, discussion, and debate among biogeneticists, paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, and historical linguists on questions relating to the emerging synthesis on language origins and ancestral human spoken languages. According to the founder of ASLIP, Harold C. Fleming, "All known human spoken languages [probably] are genetically related to each other as descendants of the first invention[s]--Ur-Human or Proto-Language. One test of that is to show a taxonomy of human languages --convincing to linguists-- which makes possible a universal family tree and ultimately the reconstructions of major cultural events associated with the evolution of modern people. Another corollary is that the complex evolution of physical humans --population movements and shared mutations-- can be figured out and related to a universal family tree which can be dated and located to its roots. Finally, tests of these theories can be made through archaeological discoveries...

Friday, December 4, 2009

Welcome to Before Farming, the journal designed for archaeologists and anthropologists researching hunter-gatherers past and present.

The online journal is quarterly, published by the Western Academic & Specialist Press.

Each year a paperback volume is published. This is a compilation of the previous year's online issues. Because it is not always possible to transfer all elements of the online version directly to print this volume is not an exact reproduction of the online version of the journal.

The first two online issues of Before Farming are free to view and download. Please note that although the format of these two issues is similar to later issues of the journal the title and scope of Before Farming has since changed. Formerly concerned with "the archaeology of Old World hunter-gatherers" the journal is now expanded to encompass "the archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers" with no geographical or temporal restrictions. Please bear this in mind when perusing these issues.

Saudi Aramco, the oil company born as an international enterprise 75 years ago, distributes Saudi Aramco World to increase cross-cultural understanding. The bimonthly magazine's goal is to broaden knowledge of the cultures, history and geography of the Arab and Muslim worlds and their connections with the West. Saudi Aramco World is distributed without charge, upon request, to interested readers worldwide.In print, Saudi Aramco World is published six times a year: January/February (JF); March/April (MA); May/June (MJ); July/August (JA); September/October (SO) and November/December (ND). From its launch in 1949 until the May/June 2000 issue, the magazine's name was Aramco World. The July/August 2000 issue was the first to carry the name Saudi Aramco World .

In 1995 a suggestion was made to establish the Polish Association for Jewish Studies, which would have as its main goal the consolidation and integration of scholars and institutions involved in Jewish Studies. In February 1996 the Polish Association for Jewish Studies (PAJS) was registered in Cracow. Statutory aims of PAJS are the promotion and popularization of scholarly research on Jewish history and culture, with particular attention to the history of the Jews in Poland, and the development of cooperation with Polish and foreign institutions and associations.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

As part of its Electronic Publications Initiative and with the generous support of Misty and Lewis Gruber, the Oriental Institute Publications Office announces the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) publication of:

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

As of this morning the number of email addresses subscribed to The Ancient World Online by way of the FeedBurner utility has passed six hundred. I'm pleased that so many of you find it useful enough to subscribe. I welcome your feedback in the form of comments on in individual posts, or directly.

I am considering ways to make the data presented here more bibliographically accessible. Here at the ISAW Library we are developing schemes to create MARC records for the open access resources for which such records are appropriate. I am also considering developing a publicly accessible Zotero bibliography parallel to AWOL.

For those of you who have not already seen it, I would like to draw your attention to the exhibition at ISAW which opened earlier this month.

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.